Now that you've come this far, I'll drop the third person and communicate directly.
I was born in Liverpool and educated there and at Wadham College, Oxford, where I read English. During my time as a student I started writing poetry seriously and worked with Michael Schmidt, a fellow-undergraduate, with whom for a time I co-edited Carcanet - which was then a magazine and not a publishing house.
When Carcanet began publishing pamphlets, my first booklet of poems, Against the Sea, was among the earliest things they published. I have had a long and happy relationship with Carcanet Press and its magazine, PN Review, ever since.
After two years of postgraduate research at Wadham and Wolfson Colleges, Oxford, I moved to Manchester (where I still live) to lecture at the University, starting as a junior lecturer and ending as Professor of Romantic and Early Victorian Studies. In 1977 I met and fell in love with my muse and future wife, Amanda, and the same year I published my first full-length collection of poems, Fools' Paradise. That book has been followed by five other books of poems: Tourists (1987), A Prismatic Toy (1991), Selected Poems (2000) and - published by WAVE Books in Australia - the first four sections of my long poem-in-progress on the life of the Buddha, Touching the Earth. My new major collection, Playing With Fire, was published by Carcanet Press in 2006.
In the late 1970s I became interested in Thomas De Quincey, 'the English Opium-Eater', essayist and friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge. I wrote a biography of him, published in 1981 as The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey. Later I edited his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings for the Oxford World's Classics series in 1985, and this led to my becoming General Editor of The Works of Thomas De Quincey, a 21-volume complete edition of his writings, produced by a team of eleven editors under my co-ordination and published in 2000-03.
Alongside this work I published in 1993 A Literary Guide to the Lake District, a systematic and - I hope - entertaining guide to the area's literary connections from the earliest times to the present day. It was well received by critics and Lakeland enthusiasts, and won the 'Lakeland Book of the Year' award in 1994. A new fully updated edition appeared in 2005 from Sigma Press.
I've written freuqently for the Times Literary Supplement over the past twenty years, and have reviewed have reviewed poetry, biography, Romantic editions, fiction, exhibitions and - most often - theatre. I have, in fact, written for the TLS on everything from wallpaper to the Marx Brothers (though as Groucho might have pointed out, nowadays I generally use a keyboard). Currently I also write essays and reviews for a range of magazines including The London Magazine, Stand, PN Review, Poetry London and Temenos Academy Review.
In 1983 I met the poet and scholar Kathleen Raine (1908-2003), who started publishing my poetry and other work in her review Temenos. When the journal was revived for its second series as Temenos Academy Review I acted as deputy editor, and when Kathleen Raine relinquished the journal in 2000 I became editor, a post which I held until 2003. During the same period I acted as Academic Director of The Temenos Academy, an educational charity founded by Kathleen Raine to offer 'teaching in philosophy and the arts in the light of the spiritual traditions of east and west'.
I believe that for the practice of poetry or any other art, or even for living a reasonably sane life, it is vital to have contact with the 'deep imagination' - the place where our individual insight and creativity connects with universal archetypes and spiritual dimensions. My work for Temenos hopes to foster this. In 1997 I edited The White Goddess by Robert Graves to make this important and inspiring book accessible in an accurate text to readers and poets. For more than twenty years I have practised (and at times taught) meditation under the auspices of the Samatha Trust. I see all these activities, together with my creative work, as tending in the same general direction. The 'Links' on this website will supply more information if you need it.
In 2001 I left the University of Manchester to write full time. Since then I have produced an updated second edition of A Literary Guide to the Lake District(Sigma 2005); and a substantial new book of poems, Playing With Fire (Carcanet 2006). The collection gathers together poems I've written over the past decade or so and also has a particular focus on sexuality and the erotic, an area I felt I wanted to explore in more detail. (For some background to this, you might like to read my essay 'Strippers'which you can find by going to 'Prose' and clicking on 'Essays and Reviews', then scrolling down).
I'm now working on a travel book, Travels on the Dance Floor, as well as a major new biography, Charles Williams: The Last Magician (contracted to Oxford University Press for 2008). Information about all these projects and my other work, past and present, is available elsewhere on this website.
As well as having a busy writing and research programme I give frequent poetry readings, lectures, talks and so on in the UK and elsewhere. I am always happy to contribute to conferences or other events and I have plenty of experience in appearing on radio, TV and video. If you would like to discuss a project, please email me. I'm especially happy to talk about poetry, Romanticism, landscape and environment, sexuality, spirituality or any combination of these.
I hope you'll enjoy this website and that you'll explore some of the links it offers.
Grevel Lindop
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This picture was taken on the roof of my salsa teacher's apartment in Centro Habana. You can see the Capitolio, the government building at the centre of the Cuban capital city, behind me. You can also see the characteristically dilapidated state of Havana's buildings! I was wearing the wrong shirt for this occasion: the stripes strobed horribly with the camera and nothing I do will get rid of the jagged effect in the picture!